A Brief History of Search:

The Ongoing Arms Race Between
Substance and Subterfuge

We get asked a lot about how search works, and where it's
headed. Many people are rightly concerned that the tricks of
today may no longer prove effective tomorrow, and as a result they
wonder if there is perhaps something slightly…unsavory about the whole
affair. After all, they say, isn't SEO just the art of
fooling the search engines to improve one's rankings artificially?
What if we get caught?

Well, there are two kinds of SEO. There is the
sneaky kind, in which any possible trick or gimmick is considered fair
game just so long as your rankings improve in the short term. And then there is
the legitimate kind, in which your ranks improve because your site has
actually increased in value. Some people call these two
schools "black hat" and "white hat" SEO, named for their counterparts
in the hacking communities. (Black hat hackers are the guys
who are bent on theft and anarchy, while the white hat hackers defend
the rest of us.)

Understanding the difference between these approaches in the
world of SEO can be difficult — it is, after all, a sliding scale, and
standards continue to change. But at Breakthrough Content we
fall firmly into the white hat camp, and not just because it keeps our
clients safe. We are 100% positive that our approach is the
only reliable way to win the search rankings.

To help you understand why, we have prepared this little
essay. It describes where search has been, where it is today,
and where it's headed. Buckle up and read on — what
follows is a sweeping tale of deceit and betrayal to rival your
favorite dime-store novel.

Inside the Mind of Google

Imagine for a moment that you are Google. You make
lots of products such as Gmail, Android, and Google Voice.
And even though these products are wildly popular, you
give them away for free. Yet somehow your company is valued
in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Why?

Because of search. Specifically, because
of the little blue paid advertisements that appear alongside
Google's organic search results, known as AdWords. These tiny
four-line marketing campaigns are based on a simple idea: business
owners are constantly looking for ways to find the customers who are
looking for them. Why not charge those business owners to
have their ads appear alongside the search terms they most desire?

AdWords has quietly become the greatest online success story
of the last decade. AdWords is so incredibly, unthinkably
lucrative, in fact, that it essentially underwrites everything Google does.

And yet, AdWords is only successful to the extent that it
shares screen real estate with Google's true core business: search.
In other words, it is only because everyone you know uses
Google to find
just about everything that AdWords is able to rack up millions of
clicks
every minute.

It is not unreasonable, therefore, to ask what would happen to
Google if its flagship search engine became less useful.
People would take their searches elsewhere, AdWords
impressions would take a nosedive, and Google's revenues would suffer
an outrageous blow. Overnight, Google's diverse
suite of products would begin to perish. So it
is safe to say that Google's very survival as a company is tied to
being the best at search. And the only way to do that
is
to provide the most relevant and useful results on the planet.

Which brings us to the main point: Google is deeply invested in
returning search results that people like. Hundreds of
engineers have spent
billions of dollars trying to improve this technology over many years,
because nobody in Mountain View has ever found another product
one-tenth as
profitable as search.

And in this Corner…

So now we have established what Google's goal is.
But what about everyone else, especially the millions of
business owners who rely on Google's search rankings to draw visitors
and traffic to their sites? How do their goals square with
Google's?

Well, there isn't a business owner or webmaster in the world
who doesn't want to appear at the Number One spot on Google's search
rankings. A highly ranked site brings prestige, mindshare,
and above all, traffic. And traffic is the engine that drives
all of online commerce.

As a result, a battle has been raging for years.
On one side is Google, whose engineers are constantly
tweaking its algorithm to
maintain the most relevant and useful search results on the Web.
On the other side is everyone else, especially business
owners doing anything they can think of to goose their rankings and
increase their
exposure.

These companies are not concerned with the
overall integrity of Google's search results so much as they are
concerned with where they stand within those results. And their
desire for better rankings has spawned an entire industry: search
engine
optimization, or SEO.

Both sides have been
locked in an escalating arms race for nearly a decade now, with
predictable victories and defeats on both sides of the ledger.
Those who choose to ignore this history do so at their own
peril, as the story can be highly instructive, both for SEO today
and for where it is headed.

So far, there have been Three Big Eras in search.

Era 1: The Curated Web

At the dawn of the Web, sites like Yahoo! and AOL
offered users a human-generated
guide to the Web. These guides were created by actual people
who sat around poring over actual computers in search of interesting sites and
worthy resources. Every site in these guides was
neatly catalogued and annotated, with standout honorees earning awards
such as the "Cool Site of the Day." Users trusted the
guides implicitly and rarely strayed beyond their recommendations.

It was a simpler time.

But as e-commerce began to take off and people began to see
that there was big money in this technology, grabbing a place of honor
at
the front of the Curated Web became a top priority. The
resulting run on the big portals created a predictable corruption of
their results. There was no expectation of purity associated
with Web search back then, so many of the best-known search engines
began to accept all kinds of payola for better placement.
Even those that were less egregious still
accepted ads that created
clear conflicts of interest.

Meantime there was a bigger problem: the Information
Superhighway was growing at an astonishing rate. The Web was
quickly becoming far too big for the "experts" to index on their own.
It was clear that the days of the Curated Web were numbered,
and that people would soon need a better way to find what they were
looking for.

The dawn of automated search was nigh.

Era 2: The Keyword Gold Rush

The first fully computerized search algorithms bowed to a
rocky start. Sites like AlltheWeb and Altavista grew quickly
into sensations, and then vanished just as quickly as users became
frustrated with their inconsistent results. Even the big
portals like Yahoo! and AOL rarely did much better.

Then came Google.

Google exploded onto the scene with a brand new idea: why not
base the
search results on both keywords and links?
Keywords were the
phrases that defined what a site was about. Links were the
little underlined snippets of text that pointed people toward another
site. Somewhere in the combination of these two signals,
Google reasoned, lay the secret to relevant results.

It worked. In fact it worked a little too well. Webmasters
immediately started looking for ways to game this new system.
And one of the first things they noticed was that something
called "keyword density"
seemed to be a hugely important factor. Use one phrase over
and over in an otherwise innocuous article, they discovered, and you could leap to the front of the search results.
Any page that used the phrase "children's plastic toy bins" a
few dozen
times across a few hundred words would win the rankings for that term.

Overnight, an entire industry of "content farms" sprung up offering
clients thousands of articles at pennies a word, all guaranteed to
boast "optimal keyword density." Businesses large and small
began shelling out big money for massive content deliveries
without even reading what they bought. Never had it been easier to win
search with cash.

The gold rush was on.

Imagine Google's horror. All of a sudden, sites that
offered no relevant content at all were winning their vaunted
search rankings. The engineers at the helm of this
still-young company knew it was destined for the scrap heap
unless
they could figure out a way to restore the integrity of their search
results, and fast. Their answer? De-emphasize the
keyword part and focus far more on the other half of the equation —
inbound links.

Era 3: Rise of the Link Farms

And so opened the next front in the arms race between
Google and SEO.

Links had always been in Google's DNA, of course — just look
at PageRank,
the idea that started the company. But
links became far more important once all that spam began to
clog
up the Web. When Google changed its algorithm to
make inbound links by far the biggest determining factor in search,
they based the change on a simple idea: webmasters could always
control and manipulate their own content, but surely they couldn't
determine who linked to them.

Could they?

Overnight, all the companies that had been
churning out hundreds of spam articles switched to buying
hundreds of links instead. "Content factories"
morphed into "link farms," and sites sprung up across the Web that
purported to offer unbiased content, all of which magically linked back
time and again to client websites. Even respected
portals that already enjoyed high search rankings began selling links
on their front pages, effectively renting out their accumulated
prestige to the highest bidder.

Once again, Google's search results began to deteriorate.

The response was as predictable as the rain: they would tweak the
algorithm once again. This time they made
two important changes: 1) punish the link farms by
preventing them from passing along any benefit, and 2) punish any
site,
big or small, that they suspected of engaging in link schemes.

It worked. In a matter of days, the link
trade began to decline, and Google's reputation was
largely restored. Which is more or less where we are today.

The Future of Search

Stamping out the massive paid-links industry solved
one of Google's last big remaining problems. Currently genuine, organically
earned
inbound links remain the coin of the realm in the race to win the search results.

But there is a new battle looming. As we speak, both
sides are gearing up for what is sure to be the next front in the SEO
arms race: the social Web, including sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Stop me if you can already guess where this is going.

Google recently announced that it will soon begin to
integrate social sites such as Facebook into its Web
rankings. This makes sense from a standpoint of
quality: when a lot of people
recommend something, that is generally a good indicator of value.
Facebook itself is even getting into the search game, and
will soon begin leveraging its unique database of user preferences to
create a search engine of its own in conjunction with Bing.

Meanwhile, the "black hats" are already busy poking at
the castle
walls, looking for new ways to manipulate the system.
Countless sites have already sprung up promising to earn you
"likes" and "followers" by the thousand with little or no effort.

Now, maybe they can do these things and maybe they can't.
But you can be certain that Google and its search brethren
will quickly find new ways to quash the latest tricks and gimmicks.
And when that happens, all the folks who briefly benefited
from the latest black-hat tactics will get tossed once again to the
back of the line.

SEO Endgame

So how does this story end?

To answer this question, imagine a future in which the
search engines are much smarter than they are now, much smarter than they
will be for some time — as smart as you and me. This may take a few years, but there is no question
it's coming. Ultimately tomorrow's search engines will be
designed to accurately answer a single question: What
would a
human
being recommend?

This is the golden question, the ultimate goal of search that
will finally close the circle back to the early days of the Curated
Web. It is an enormously complex task that will require some
significant advances in the field of A.I. But if the screaming
pace of progress we have witnessed thus far is any guide, we are moving
closer to this kind of intelligent search faster than you think.

And Google is betting the company that it can get there first.

Who will win the search rankings when all the gimmicks have
failed? What does SEO look like
when there are no more tricks to be played? The answer to
that question is as simple as asking, what do
people like?

People like things that are good.
True quality
will never go out of style because people will always come online in
search of
worthy material, now and in the future. Improving your site
is the only truly timeless SEO strategy.

Now, this may be a disappointing answer to some people,
especially those who are ill-equipped to generate anything of
substance. But to others, it should come as a tremendous
relief.
After all, if all you need to do to win search is earn it,
then let’s buckle down and get to work. Work with experts to make your site worthy
of people's attention, affection, and mindshare, and the rankings will
follow.